Japan Now Has 3 Flavors of Pet Bird-Flavored Ice Cream

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Clearly tired of everything tasting like chicken, one enterprising Japanese cafe has taken it upon themselves to bring the rest of the avian kingdom to our tastebuds with some out of the box ornithological flavors that we guarantee you won’t find at Baskin-Robbins.

Torimi Cafe, a Kobe hotspot that lets customers enjoy a katsu curry and a cup of coffee surrounded by 36 pet birds, decided to bring their love of our flying friends to the masses, so they designed a line of ice creams designed to taste like 3 different breeds of pet birds for the Hanshin Department Store Small Bird Expo in Osaka this past May. The flavors in question? Parakeet, cockatiel, and sparrow – a veritable Neapolitan of feathered, warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrates.

Using all natural ingredients, which is obviously a more expensive means of making ice cream, the cafe used the expo as a test run to see if their unique flavors would take flight with consumers and sell well enough for them to recoup their costs. Torimi Cafe first announced that, “Once in your mouth, the aroma of a parakeet would spread intensely,” which is probably the last thing I’ll hear before I die. Here’s a description of the three flavors:

Java Sparrow – A small, portly bird that feeds primarily on grains and seeds, the java sparrow inspired a flavor comprised of a vanilla ice cream base with grains mixed in. As the delicious dessert melts in your mouth, you might feel the sensation of a java sparrow rolling around on your tongue. Well, it’s not a bird; that’d be weird. It’s just marshmallows hidden inside! No one puts it better than Torimi Cafe, though: “It’s the feeling of pressing the breast of a java sparrow into your mouth.”

Parakeet – Known far and wide as the “chocolate fudge ripple” of birds, the parakeet flavor lives up to its real life counterpart’s livelier demeanor with a vanilla ice cream base that has honey and apple blended in. There’s still some grains in there, but fewer than in the java sparrow flavor. Once again, Torimi Cafe puts it best: “It’s like eating some vanilla ice cream in one hand, and then taking a whiff of a parakeet in your other hand.”

Cockatiel – One of the most popular breeds of caged pet bird, the cockatiel should also make a terrific ice cream flavor, right? (Roll with us on this one). Building off of the parakeet’s honey-apple vanilla base, cockatiel flavor eschews grains in favor of larger pumpkin and sunflower seeds to create an alternately smooth and crunchy flavor that Torimi Cafe compares to “when you’re sleeping with your mouth open and your cockatiel runs over your face and gets its leg in your mouth.” Ugh, right? That wildly common occurrence.

Don’t you just want to sink your beak into these fine feathered flavors? I know I do. Don’t get your feathers ruffled if you didn’t get to try them at Osaka’s Small Bird Expo earlier this year. Apparently, the initial run was so successful that Torimi Cafe is looking to produce more later this year.

What do you think? Would you try bird ice cream? What other birds deserve their own flavors and what would they be? Let us know in the comments below or tell me on Twitter.